So you're ready to do the hard work. Magnificent.
The people I frequently work are deep seekers, empaths, often overthinkers with a neuro quirk or two.
They know their emotions and relationships are out of alignment but haven't been able to think their way toward a solution. They can see the problem, they can even see where it came from, but for the life of them they haven’t been able to change it. These people are often survivors who needed more love than they got.
So what brings them to therapy? It could be a catalyst like spiritual crisis or baby loss. It might be that they want to live with a brain that doesn’t feel quite so at war with itself. Or they’ve tried therapy, it sucked, and they’re bravely giving it another go. Perhaps they want to explore the possibility that one can extend compassion to oneself, not just to others. Often, they've been caregivers from a young age... and many of them turned out to be therapists.
They may learn along the way that they’re stronger than they thought (but are just as smart and funny as they suspected).
Regardless of the catalyst that got them to reach out, my clients are ready to do the deep, long term work that brings lasting transformation.
Come and find out what it’s like to begin to live with ease and maybe some unexpected joy. I will take your safety and your stories seriously, and together we will make light work of the heavy stuff. I do therapy with gentleness, curiosity, and humour. But the most important thing is this: the ability to heal is already in you.
My Areas of Focus
About Me
Who I Am (and Why I Do What I Do)
I have been a therapist for 17 years now, and I can tell you the exact moment when I knew for sure this would be my path. I was in my mid 20s, adrift, playing bass in a band. There was not a lot of purpose going on there.
But around that time, my family hit a very scary rocky patch. I have five siblings, and mental illness runs in our family. It started showing up, as it often does, when we were in our teens and early twenties. Because we’re close in age, it wasn’t one crisis but a whole pile of overlapping ones, with hospitalizations happening one after the other. We took turns visiting our siblings in hospital. It was a devastating, disorienting time.
This is where people’s assumptions about “a career helping people” kind of fall apart. There is no “helping” when a family member is this sick. It’s easy to get into fights you didn’t intend with a manic person. But I did know it was better to be there than not, and so I stayed by my loved one’s bedside.
That’s it. That was my epiphany moment. It wasn’t about being a helper or a rescuer. It was simply about not leaving my sibling alone in their suffering. We were helpless together.
I have now been a therapist for long enough that my career could graduate from high school. I’ve gained a whole pile of modalities and skills along the way. But the most important, and powerful, thing I do is undoing aloneness. Going in with an attitude of being able to “fix” someone is condescending and even dangerous.
Not one human being, no matter how hurt, is a problem needing to be fixed.
But very, very often, our deepest wounds happen when we are alone in the face of great suffering, and that aloneness makes the suffering unbearable. At its core, the therapy I do is about undoing the experience of aloneness, like my sibling and I did in that hospital room.
My lived experience ended up intertwining with my professional life in a some unexpected ways. I'm grateful for that. I don’t subscribe to the idea of a grand design, but I do believe in making meaning. Our lives have profound significance, even more so when we knit them together in community.
How I Work
I work collaboratively, from a relational base. That means the relationship between therapist and client is part of the therapy. When we work on the relationship, we are doing the therapy.
I’m a trauma specialist, so I use somatic approaches that focus on how the body and nervous system have responded to threat, to help clients feel safer in the present (Sensorimotor, TIST, Brainspotting).
My main approach to trauma, Internal Family Systems, is also somatic (you notice what’s happening in your body) but extends that somatic base with the use of the imagination. This allows for an experiential moment: it feels like something transformative is happening in the here and now, we’re not just theorizing about it. This approach helps clients relate to the parts of them that helped them survive, and relieve the burdens of the parts of them that carry unbearable pain.
I am endlessly curious about how all the different therapeutic approaches hang together. (I also love sharing my learning and enthusiasm with my supervisees). I am currently studying EMDR, Coherence Therapy, and AEDP. If you ever want me to explain what a lengthy acronym stands for and how that therapy works, I would be more than happy to!
I offer long-term, depth-oriented therapy for adults. I live in Toronto and work virtually with people across Ontario. Use the contact form below if you'd like to explore working with me.